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The Flaming Lips Curate a Wild All Tomorrow’s Parties 2009
The legendary DIY festival returns to the Catskills again this month
The Flaming Lips at a 2006 UK concert (Photo: Ella Mullins/Flickr)
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Last year one of the premiere music festivals in the world, All Tomorrow’s Parties, brought their eclectic roving carnival to New York for the first time and by all accounts it was a huge success. The lodging at Kutsher’s Country Resort in Monticello sold out well in advance and My Bloody Valentine not only curated a blistering festival but used it as a launching pad for its own long-awaited return to the music scene after an absence of nearly seventeen years. This month the festival is back for round two, with The Flaming Lips and their wacky sensibility in the curator’s chair and a formidable lineup in tow.
Running from Friday September 11 to Sunday September 13, the three day/night format has bands playing one of their seminal albums in its entirety on Friday night. This year’s opening day will include sets from The Jesus Lizard, Dirty Three, The Feelies, Suicide, Iron and Wine and Panda Bear. For rock nerds like me the chance to hear a band play a whole album start to finish is a mouthwatering proposition. Yes, we are excited about the Pixies Doolittle reunion tour in November, wink wink. Friday’s program also includes a comedy stage featuring David Cross and Eugene Mirman so the spirit of the Borscht Belt will be alive and well to boot.
The ATP organizers curate Saturday’s show themselves and will feature sets from the heavily independent likes of Brooklyn’s Animal Collective, Deerhunter, The Melvins, Black Dice, Shellac, Dead Meadow and Sufjan Stevens. With some minor exceptions I would arrive for all three days armed with seriously advanced earplugs as this gig will be LOUD. VERY LOUD. And that is not to insinuate that any of these days will be mellow but you can be damn well certain that The Melvins and Shellac aren’t trekking up to the Catskills to test their unplugged material. And you should hold onto those plugs for Sunday while you’re at it.
The Flaming Lips have put together a powder keg show to close the festival on Sunday. There will be no rest on the seventh day. Not with The Boredoms from Japan doing their cacophonic nine drummer BOADRUM, a show that should probably be performed outside for public health concerns but will instead bounce off the walls of a Catskills resort ballroom. And the show only gets more out of hand from there. Sub Pop’s No Age is doing the songs of Hüsker Dü featuring the legendary Husker singer/guitarist Bob Mould himself sitting in. Yes, you heard me correctly. There will be sets from Super Furry Animals, Boris, Caribou, Black Moth Super Rainbow, Deerhoof, Brooklyn’s Oneida and Portland, Oregon indie darlings Menomena. The best, or at least, the most outlandish may come at the end of the weekend as The Flaming Lips will close the festival themselves and will no doubt go out of their way to prove how worthy they were to curate this thing. They are predictably unpredictable at all times and nothing would surprise me. Wayne Coyne could come out in a firecracker suit distributing matzo ball soup and I wouldn’t bat an eye.
Complete All Tomorrow’s Parties lineup: atpfestival.com.